Burton’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ To Receive Sequel Treatment

In other horrible, terrible, no good news of the day, Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ film from 2010 is getting an entirely undeserved sequel.

Alright, that statement was probably infused with more personal opinion than should be professionally acceptable, but it’s true. The film was already set after the original story, picking up 13 years afterwards to feature an Alice aged 19. She – somehow – manages to stumble back into the same world she had fallen into 13 years ago and finds herself in yet another fantastical predicament. The film was, if anything, already a sequel to the original story. It had taken handfuls of elements from the actual sequel (“Through The Looking-Glass”) to the original story.

So what could possibly be the point in making another one?

Money. They can say it’s because they loved making the film, or because the style was amazing to shoot in – they could really name a long list of “reasons”, but the simple fact is that they are making this movie because Burton’s “original” ‘Alice in Wonderland’ made bank. On a budget of what we’ve averaged out to $175 MILLION, it pulled in over $1 BILLION. To put that in perspective, the average cost of obtaining an undergraduate degree at a four-year public institution? It runs at about $80,000 (room and board not included in that figure). Some quick math tells us that a billion dollars could pay for the entire freshman year of education (~$20,000) for some odd fifty-thousand students, OR for that matter, four years of education for 12,500 students. Simply said, the movie made a lot of money.

As far as critical reception goes, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ didn’t fare too warmly and holds only a 51% approval rating. The biggest gripe that most people had with the film was the heavy use of CGI, and that the last half of the movie was almost entirely pointless.

Why bother with a sequel? A chance for Burton to cast his wife and Depp again (again)? A chance to really explore the universe the story is set in again (again)?

Nope. Money. The blame doesn’t necessarily lie on Tim Burton for this movement, though – it lies on Disney more than anything. My personal opinion? They’re trying to make up for the $4 billion dollars they just lost in buying the rights to Star Wars by gushing out a sequel to the billion-dollar-boom on the chance that they might, just maybe, strike gold once more.